Category Archives: Apple

Macs do Star Wars dirty work

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In Macs do Star Wars dirty work on the BBC’s news site, the work of Lowry Digital Images [a company that does not seem to have a web presence?] in scanning and cleaning the Star Wars films ready for use in digital form on the DVD set is described. Lowry took the original Star Wars film spools and scanned them all for the DVD set. So what? Well, old film, especially old film that has been handled a lot, is covered in dirt and scratches that scanners will see. Additionally, older sci-fi movies with complex special effects that were created using layers of film tend to be grainier and softer focus than we are used to with today’s CG effects.

Lowry Digital Images uses a bank of 600 dual CPU Mac G5 boxes to clean up the frames once the film has been scanned at very high resolution. Each frame occupies 70MB (and there are around 180,000 frames in each Star Wars movie). This calls for a lot of storage, but Lowry has 400TB online.

In addition to the story at the BBC, there is an article about John D. Lowry, and one specifically about the Star Wars work on the Apple website – both worth reading (the Star Wars one even has some before and after stills and a QuickTime 360 degree look inside the CPU room).

Fake iPod Generation 5

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Fake iPod Generation 5An article at Gizmodo talks about the fake iPod shown to the right. They provide a link to the full size ‘ad’ image too which includes a spec. While this is clearly a joke, I would have changed a few things to make this more realistic:

  • Drop the Dragonball CPU in favour of a high speed ARM or XScale CPU, perhaps with Jazelle Java acceleration technology built in.
  • With such large hard drive, there’s no need to have so much flash, but at least 256MB of RAM would be handy. Perhaps even more.
  • For wireless support, include 802.11n Wi-Fi or even WiMax for always-on wireless access (at least in metro areas, where one or both of these technologies might be used to light up a whole city).
  • Add USB host support to get the photos off my camera and on to that HD while I’m travelling. Better still support for doing this over a wireless link, but that requires my camera supporting Wi-Fi or Bluetooth – and the one I have now doesn’t have either option 🙁

They are spot on with the OS though. There is no reason at all, at least not once you move to a real CPU, to have a port of the BSD/Mach based Mac OS X on a handheld device like this. I run the Familiar distribution of Linux on my iPaq which has a much lower spec than even today’s PDAs and it works just fine. NetBSD proves that BSD can be ported to many platforms (they claim more than Linux, though that must be getting close now). Why not have Mac OS X on a handheld?

[If folks over at Apple are reading and like the idea, perhaps I could do the port for you – I have been porting operating systems to embedded platforms for much of my career!]

Apple @ Stonestown Galleria

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Alameda sunset Saturday was the opening of a new Apple store at Stonestown Galleria. According to the report at IFO Apple Store people were in line at 5:30am. I turned up at the doors to the mall just before 10am (already early for me on a Saturday morning!). The line at that point was from the front of the actual store to the main mall doors, but it took less than an hour to get into the store.

The store itself is pretty small (half the size of the Victoria’s Secret store that used to occupy the space before they moved over the other side of the walkway). Not everything they sell is on display either (e.g. the Canon digital SLRs) – they do stock some of them though, and will get them out if you ask.

The specials for opening day were a minimalist black t-shirt (nicely boxed) and entry into a sweepstakes to win a bundle of stuff, including one of the new iMac G5 systems.

Apples

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No, not the fruit. In this case, 15″ laptop computers from Apple. I have my eyes on one of these, but various rumour sites, such as MacRumors, have been hinting at the impending arrival of an updated model.

Current levels of stock at various large retailers, such as Amazon and CompUSA, would seem to confirm this – they all have none available and are reporting wait times of up to 4 weeks. Since this is one of the high points in the sales cycle (back to school – how times change eh?), it seems odd that they would not have plenty of stock on hand to sell to new students. Perhaps on Monday there will be news – last week after all they had the annoucement about the new G5 machines shipping…